Investigation into the non-invasive monitoring of blood glucose levels in people with diabetes

Abstract

Diabetes Mellitus is a condition that reduces the body's ability to maintain normal bloodglucose levels. Maintaining the correct blood glucose level is important as it provides differentparts of the body with energy to function properly. Because of this, diabetics must be able toknow what the levels are, so they can control them with supplements or other treatments.At present, people with diabetes must monitor their blood glucose levels using invasivetechniques like needles and pin-prick devices sometimes up to three or four times a day,depending on the severity of their condition. Because of the pain and inconvenience of testingusing this method, sufferers don't always test themselves as often as they should.A non-invasive, in vivo system of monitoring blood glucose levels is the vision of thisinvestigation. Being non-invasive would make the task of measuring blood sugar painless. Invivo, in a clinical testing sense means constantly monitoring. This is in contrast to the in vitromethod commonly used today where blood is extracted with the needle or pin-prick andanalysed. As much a problem as pain for the diabetic is the inconvenience of having to stopwhat they are doing and test themselves. A solution could be a device which constantlymonitors without being prompted by the user. An in vivo system has advantages as it could beused in the future to provide a closed-loop insulin delivery system (i.e an artificial pancreas),and it can provide alarms for hypoglycaemic (low glucose) and hyperglycaemic (too muchglucose) attacks.There have been some studies into using near-infrared light to measure the glucose levels, butas yet this method is not accurate enough for clinical applications. This project will investigatethe method and determine if there are any ways to improve the quality of signals or similaralternatives.